Atticus

“Partied,” Atticus said.

She seemed about to give him examples but thought better of it. “We all live on the fringe here. We make up the rules as we go along.”

Atticus scowled at the orchids upright in a vase on the sideboard. Sink water had greened to the color of vinegar. “Scott gave me the impression you were getting back together.”

She sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. We were still cordial. But all the intensity was on his part. I’m really trying to get it right with Stuart.”

Atticus stared at Renata without comment, and she shied away from it. She looked at the kitchen. After a while he said, “Taxi driver seemed to know this house. Called it Cozy-something.”

“Cotzibaha. It’s a Mayan honorific for ’house of the artist.’”

“Was Scott that famous?”

“He went native when he first got here. Hung out with a shaman named Eduardo. And he gave them money. You get famous fast doing that.”

“I suppose.” Atticus looked at the hard calluses of his hands and scratched at one with his thumbnail. “Another thing. Was he joking or was Scott truly renting this house from criminals?”

She laughed. “Marty? Marty sells real estate in Chicago.”

“Oh. I get it.”

“You asked that like a detective.”

“Well …” He held a hand against his yawn. “Would you like some coffee, or, I don’t know, a pop?”

“Yes, I think so.” Atticus half-lifted from his chair, but she was already up. “Don’t. I’ll get it.”

She got a Corona from the refrigerator and was rummaging for an opener in a kitchen drawer when she caught sight of the Kodak snapshots. She glanced at him and found knowledge of her in his face. She worriedly stared at her shameless pose on the sand, then flipped the pictures into the basket and blushed with embarrassment as she sat with him again. She drank beer straight from the bottle and finished half before she placed it in front of her.

“Stuart take it?”

“We weren’t a ménage à trois, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Atticus softly petted his hair. “I’m finding my education kinda deficient here.”

She smiled. “We weren’t a threesome.”

“Oh.” Atticus reddened and said, “You got my mind reeling now.”

“It shows.”

“Those pictures. I was just hunting anything handy. You know, to try to figure things out.”

She was all inwardness for a while, and she faced nothing as she said, “Unfortunately there’s not much to know.”

She told him she’d first seen Scott on Wednesday afternoon. She was just coming from a friend’s studio at the American College where she’d been sitting as a nude model. “We needed the money,” she said.

“We?”

“Well, just me, I guess. Wrong pronoun.”

“You’ll inherit twenty-five thousand from his trust

fund. Frank had a look at his will.”

“Really? How sweet of him.” She gave it some thought and then changed her expression. She ran a hand through her hair. “Shall I go on?”

She told him she walked with Scott to The Scorpion at five and Stuart joined them a half hour later. Scott hardly talked to her or Stuart, and he drank like drunkenness was the whole idea. Wednesday was a fiesta and there was a Children’s Defense Fund benefit at a hall in the Marriott, where they paid twenty dollars each for Mexican food on paper plates and Renata and four other Americans gave a reading of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. She once looked up from a page of the script and saw Scott sitting far in the back and holding a full pitcher of margarita up to his mouth like a frat boy, and she got so angry she hardly spoke to him afterward. And then he disappeared and she threw a cast party at Stuart’s villa and she regretted her anger and tried to telephone him at his house. There was no answer, so she left a message. Late that night Scott telephoned her and said he’d forgotten where he’d parked his Volkswagen but he was pretty sure it was in the jardín. Would she get it for him? Scott told her he was finishing up something at the house in the jungle where he painted.